This report documents the housing process that Save the Children and its partners developed in the district of Ampara, Sri Lanka after the tsunami. The houses involved were transitional shelters, designed to bridge the gap between providing immediate emergency shelter and the construction of permanent housing.

But there are other gaps that this process also addressed – the gap between top- down responses and those that include the people affected; the gap between sectoral responses and the many interrelated needs of those who have been through a calamity like this; the gap between the delivery of assistance and the more complex process of helping people to take control of their lives again. These gaps are familiar to all involved in disaster response work and perhaps most of all to people whose lives have been affected. The intention here is not to suggest that Save the Children in Sri Lanka found solutions to all the complexities of providing assistance after a disaster. It did, however, find sensible ways to respond to many common pitfalls and these deserve to be documented.